Mac OS X Turns 20!

I missed this by a few weeks but wanted to mark the occasion anyway. When Apple released OS X twenty years ago (March 24, 2001) I was there on day one. I‘d actually been running the public beta on my lime green iMac. Exciting days! Like many I really loved the classic Mac OS which I‘d used from 7.x on my Color Classic all the way thru to OS 9. It was a beautiful, fun OS to use when it wasn‘t crashing! To be fair, it was mostly stable and I did a lot with my Macs before OS X. But my oh my, OS X was a thing of beauty! In hindsight we might look back on it as a bit overdone but in the moment I loved it. In the early days it was slow but even then it was fairly stable, especially in comparison to Mac OS 9.

Image courtesy of 512pixels.net Image Archive

Apple made no secret that OS X was the future of the Mac OS. There would be no turning back and really, it did feel like the future. It was similar enough to the classic Mac OS that one could use it without feeling lost. But, with the new Aqua interface it also felt very different. Add to that the new Finder, the Dock, Mail and a few others. Then there was the new ability to create pdfs from any application via print to pdf which felt a bit like a super power.

Fun fact, in contrast to today‘s free, downloadable os updates, back in those days the os was delivered via DVD and cost a bit, in the case of OS X 10.0 it was $129.

My current desktop on my MacMini running macOS Catalina

Looking at OS X then and now I am still somewhat astounded by the fact that we‘ve seen so many transitions over the past 20 years. That OS X is the core OS of the watch on my wrist, my phone, and my iPad as well as the Mac on my desk in an amazing iterative achievement. And while the pinstripes of Aqua were transformed into a variety of textures over the years and are now utterly absent, replaced by light grays, whites and subtle gradients, looking at my Mac running macOS Catalina or my iPad running iPadOS 14, I can‘t help but recognize the many persistent similarities. I see OS X on my screen. From the Dock to Mail to Files, traces of OS X in it‘s infancy continue today.

My current iPad Pro Homepage

Looking through the excellent 512pixels image archive I can‘t help notice that as much as has changed over the years so much of that first 10.0 version is still so visible today.

Here‘s Steve Jobs at the MacWorld 2000 Keynote presenting OS X. A really fun video!

From the web:

Stephen Hackett of 512pixels.net has a brief post which consists of some great links. A fantastic screenshot library. Start with OS X 10.0

Jason Snell has these three articles:
From Aqua to Catalina: The evolution of macOS X

Mac OS X: An act of desperation that formed the foundation for the modern Mac

Mac OS X turns 20

John Voorhees over at Mac Stories: 20 Years Ago, Mac OS X Set the Stage for Today‘s Apple